Satoshi Disappear Day: CIA agent bought bitcoin from former lead developer

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There is so much more to Bitcoin than Satoshi. Let’s celebrate!

Today is Satoshi Disappear Day, as declared by early contributor Kiba on this day in 2011.

“Since satoshi has been confirmed to be not coming back, the bitcoin community now [has] to fend for ourselves,” Kiba wrote.

“I propose we make a bitcoin holiday in honor of our legendary anonymous founder and to observe the fact that the bitcoin community will be just fine after the inventor of bitcoin left. Even if Gavin is hit by the bus tomorrow, we can live.”

Gavin Andresen had disclosed his impending meeting with the CIA, both privately with Satoshi and publicly on the Bitcointalk forum, only days earlier.

On This Day — Satoshi Disappear Day

What Kiba said turned out to be true. Since Satoshi left, other contributors have worked together to release 73 new versions of the software on bitcoin’s way to becoming a multi-trillion dollar asset.

In that time, developers have pushed upgrades big and small while mitigating bugs and potential disasters. Bitcoin’s creator was otherwise only around for a half dozen or so, even if they conceived and built the original version all by themselves.

We also can’t exactly draw a direct line between Gavin’s CIA visit and Satoshi’s disappearance. A few days before Gavin announced he was to meet with the CIA, Satoshi in an email had already mentioned to another early developer, Mike Hearn, that he had “moved on to other things.”

But considering Satoshi apparently never replied to Gavin’s email, at the very least we can assume it helped confirm their decision to never return.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin was attracting mainstream media attention, with Andy Greenberg’s article in Forbes, “Crypto Currency,” running in the week leading up to the inaugural Satoshi Disappear Day.

The article is a progenitor of the “super shadowy coder” trope that has plagued political crypto discourse ever since. It mistakenly describes Bitcoin developers as Gavin’s “underground cadre of cypherpunks” working on anonymous money used to buy illegal drugs outside of government oversight — an image against which Satoshi wanted to push back.

“I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle,” Satoshi told Gavin. “Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them.”

Gavin wasn’t happy with the “wacky pirate money” theme either, and agreed that more credit for other contributors was a great idea.

“On a completely different subject: I did something that I hope turns out to be smart, but might be stupid,” Gavin said. He’d been contacted by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the CIA that discovers and invests in cutting-edge technologies that would benefit US agencies.

Gavin’s visit with the CIA was a recurring topic of interest in Bitcoin IRC channels.

In-Q-Tel had invited Gavin to its annual conference on emerging technologies, with the theme of that year being “Mobility of Money.”

“They asked if I’d be willing to talk about Bitcoin, and I committed to giving a 50-minute presentation and participating in a panel discussion,” Gavin wrote in his email.

“I hope that by talking directly to ‘them’ and, more importantly, listening to their questions/concerns, they will think of Bitcoin the way I do — as a just-plain-better, more efficient, less-subject-to-political-whims money. Not as an all-powerful black-market tool that will be used by anarchists to overthrow The System.”

Gavin found himself between a rock and a hard place. “It might be really stupid if it just raises Bitcoin’s visibility on [the CIA’s] radar, but I think it is way too late for that; Bitcoin is already on their radar,” he told Satoshi.

He was also transparent about the trip. Gavin shared his presentation on BitcoinTalk shortly after (the full version is still available via archive) and quickly appeared on Bruce Wagner’s The Bitcoin Show to discuss the meeting.

“After thinking pretty hard about it, I decided I would do it because it’s an open-source project. I figured, you know, going to the CIA and talking very openly about what Bitcoin is and what it can do wouldn’t hurt the project. It’s not a secret,” Gavin said on the podcast.

The conference itself was a three-day event with the first day unclassified, which meant Gavin could discuss it, while the other two were classified. Gavin said there were people from PayPal and Facebook in attendance, as well as economists from the Federal Reserve.

Gavin’s presentation offered a tutorial on how Bitcoin works, alongside a rundown on the state of the ecosystem as it was in June 2011.

As for why the CIA might be interested in Bitcoin, Gavin could only speculate, like the rest of us.

“I mean, obviously, you know, paying people covertly is part of what the CIA does, and so a payment system that they could use to [pay] somebody covertly is very interesting to them,” Gavin said.

For those after more intrigue, this might help: Gavin sold bitcoin to a CIA agent at the conference. “I had a couple of people come up to me afterwards and say they thought bitcoin is really cool. One interesting interaction: I actually sold a bitcoin while I was there to one of the CIA people.”

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